Forum:CT Archive/Naming policy and titles

This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made in the Senate Hall or new Consensus Track pages rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record.The result of the debate was Vote 1: Support hide function in {{Eras}} template. Vote 2: Support Naming policy addition. Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 20:14, June 11, 2014 (UTC)

This one's a two-parter.

Contents

Firstly, there's an issue with the Eras template that needs addressing.

So, the eras template's ability to hide "/Canon" from a page's title was recently removed, with the cited reason being that it complicates copy-pasting the article name. However, I strongly disagree with the removal, and thus am putting it to a vote. I believe the eras template should be able to hide "/Canon" in a page's title, as it's harmless - copy-pasting the name won't link to a redlink or a pagename that is not allowed for technical reasons, like using # in a title, and it makes our articles look far cleaner. The hiding function won't be used on a large number of articles; only TCW and the movies, and those same articles will already feature the canon/legends tabs just below the title pointing people to whichever continuity they want. It looks ridiculous to include "/Canon" when the names are italicized, and more to the point, it doesn't match the name of the article's subject. The article Palpatine/Canon doesn't cover someone named "Palpatine/Canon", it's just the canon version of Palpatine. Unlike parenthetical, which are separated from the actual title by a space and a parentheses, the "/Canon" is just crammed right next to the name. This will also apply to Legends when we make the switch to Canon as default; we don't want potentially hundreds of articles saying "/Legends" or "/Canon".

The LG's section on the Title tag would also be revised to this:

Do not use this to alter the actual title (ex: Only displaying "Title" instead of "Title (disambiguation)"). The only acceptable exception is to hide "/Canon" or "/Legends" from the page title, a function that will be built into the {{Eras}} template and never done manually.

I understand the concern for potential issues when someone wants to copy-and-paste an article title, but that's frankly a fairly insignificant problem, and the benefits of article title presentation far outweigh any potential problems here. It looks very bad when an article title has "/Canon" or "/Legends" in it, and if we can easily hide that, we should be taking advantage of this. Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 01:25, May 28, 2014 (UTC)

I was hoping to get some support on my compromise idea below. And I was really going back and forth on which way to vote here. I really like being able to copy-paste the displayed title for editing. However, in the end I think how the title is displayed is more important to the readership than the convenience to the editors. - Esjs(Talk) 02:50, June 5, 2014 (UTC)

Hell no. Harmless? On the contrary, it's more harmful than fudging the actual title, because it causes a naive newbie that copies and pastes the title to create a blue link to the wrong article, which is much harder to detect than a redlink staring you in the face. It makes it significantly harder to create links, because every single time one wishes to create a link, one would now have to consult the URL in the browser's address bar, which presents accessibility issues for people with poor vision as the address bar cannot be easily zoomed in like the webpage can. This should not even be something that is considered, as it goes against everything a normal person would expect out of a wiki.

Except that "wrong article" is simply the Legends version of the same article with a banner declaring it Legends and a tab set linking to the canon version. This will only apply to articles that include "/Canon", thereby requiring the Legends version that will be accidentally linked to to have the tabs. As for your thing about accessibility, I don't understand what you're trying to say. Contrary to what you said, this is not more harmful than changing the title; it's never going to cause copy-paste to be anything but the Legends version, which, again, has the tabs. There's also autosuggest, which will show both "Yoda" and "Yoda/Canon" in the dropdown options. The technical issues really seem rather minor. CadeCalrayn 17:33, May 29, 2014 (UTC)

A possible compromise: apply style to the /Canon part so that it is either much smaller than the rest of the title, or is white-on-white. That way the text is still there for copying, and the actual subject (title) gets prominence for display purposes. - Esjs(Talk) 04:05, June 1, 2014 (UTC)

So, with the growing number of canon articles, there have been instances that canon articles are overwriting Legends redirects. It's best that we codify this into policy. I'm proposing that we add a new subheading under Specific rules:

In the instance a canon article requires the use of an article title currently occupied by a redirect to a Legends article or a Legends disambiguation page, the canon article should be created at that title, overwriting the redirect or disambiguation page. The canon article and the Legends version of that article should then use the "legends" and "canon" parameters in the {{Eras}} template to correctly link the two article tabs. For example, Ackbar should not redirect to Gial Ackbar but should instead be the article title for the canon version of Ackbar.